I'm glad you changed your av and I respect your decision to not change your name back.

... but my problem now is that when I look at your name and your av together, it's a bunch of words that confuse my brain. I know what they mean, they just don't look right and it looks like it's doing it on purpose to be mean. It comes off as pretentious and I don't feel like you're very pretentious.

I'm just sharing an unwanted opinion. Not telling you to change your av again. Everyone else seems to like it.

I'd still like to offer a suggestion because this is what I think of when I read your name:

You may or may not have noticed a recently added forum that is only visible to guests, ie. lurkers who have not registered or lurkers who have registered but had not been approved due to overwhelming spambot registrations.

Over the last couple months, Xixax has been positively slammed by attempted spambot registrations. There are ways to weed through these and find out who among them is a real person and who's a bot, but it's time-consuming, and the volume of registrations that's been coming in have made it prohibitive.

If you are an actual person who would like to register, or have tried to register and never got approved, please email me: polkablues (at) gmail.com. Make the subject line "Xixax registration", or something to that effect, and please include in the message the username under which you tried to register. I will then go in, find your pending registration, and approve you.

Hopefully this method will allow us to still ignore the spambots while actually letting our little community get some fresh blood injected into it. Thanks!

in light of this improvement in the registration process we can welcome the latest member with the awesome name of chere mill! and now we wait for him (and the others) to stop lurking and post already..

Hi, I'm O. Well, that's the first letter of my last name. My birth name is Kevin. K.O. Knock-out.

One day I was browsing through Cigarettes & Red Vines (which became a regular activity as soon as life started emerging on the Master/IV front) and found the Hard Eight/Sydney archives had been completed, so I begun looking around, as you must imagine. Whether or not the word Xixax had come across my eyes in the past or not, this was the first time it had actually caught my attention. 'XIXAX MESSAGE BOARD' was linked in the directory before the Hard Eight archives and I thought 'what possible relevance could this message board have?' So I checked it out. I don't remember my initial reaction, but it was definitely one of excitement and silent intrigue. What caught my particular attention was how the Director-specific forums had [seemingly] specifically picked out the directors that I found especially noteworthy. So I started lurking, and found that many of the same posters continually cropped up in more and more threads, which reminded me of other forums I had been a art of earlier in my life that had a small community closeness where everyone got to know each others mannerisms and where you felt your words weren't simply being overlooked in the high-traffic hustle and bustle forums of Google top search results. From the outside looking in, it seemed like Xixax had the perfect blend of film insight by people who liked what I liked and thought how I thought about film with the community closeness I really cherished. So I got excited and signed up. That was months ago.

I had been waiting for an admin's approval for months. I just assumed the community had been closed off for aristocratic reasons and I was just too late to partake. Then a few more months passed, right up until recently, I lurked around, tried to see if I could sign in (no luck) until I found the post Pubrick mentioned above on my way out of the site for probably the last time in any foreseeable future. Then one of those "Ohhh...!" moments occurred. Jumped on that e-mail as quick as a saw and thus, here I am.

What else is there to say, you know? A few of the basics, I would suppose are a good place to start. I'm 19. I think PTA is great. I like visually and psychologically striking films, and generally everything kafkaesque. I like StarCraft, and eSports too... um, and I'd like to get to know all of you of course!

As you may already know, Xixax originated directly from the ptanderson.com message board. (When that was shut down, we created this.) Everyone behind C&RV is from our little group; in fact 2 of them are current/former Xixax admins. So your PTA fandom is definitely welcome.

which reminded me of other forums I had been a part of earlier in my life that had a small community closeness where everyone got to know each others mannerisms and where you felt your words weren't simply being overlooked in the high-traffic hustle and bustle forums of Google top search results

That could be my favorite aspect of Xixax. We don't produce a ton of posts and we don't have a ton of active users, but no one gets ignored and we're actually able to have really in-depth discussions when the occasion arises (Tree of Life is a recent example).

We also have an abundance of active admins, so you don't have to wade through the abusive/obnoxious/idiotic posts that litter most message boards. Though honestly I can't remember the last time we actually banned someone or even deleted a post... I guess we weeded out all the trolls and such near the beginning.

Sorry about the registration issues... we (well, polkablues) just recently revamped our registration process to hopefully let more people in. We were forced to essentially shut it down at one point because of the overwhelming flood of bots and spammers and such.

Hopefully, that would be great. I don't really know much about anti-spam or security, but I would guess maybe the visual verification software is obsolete or outdated? It looks so, anyway, as if the spammers have managed to script bots to bypass that sort of verification. If it's possible, perhaps it might be worth upgrading to reCAPTCHA, which seems to me like the most popular anti-spam visual verification software out there.

Word just came down that our friendly neighborhood expert has revamped our captcha system for us, so hopefully registration will become a more painless process from here on out. At the worst point, we were experiencing a ratio somewhere in the range of 100-200 spambot registrations per actual person.

“The myth by no means finds its adequate objectification in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the visible imagery reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself is able to put into words and concepts” – Friedrich Nietzsche